Lexi had slept poorly, something hardly unusual but for a markedly different reason from the norm.  Restlessness had always haunted her in the run-up to something big, that horrible cocktail of hype, fear and caffeine thrumming through her veins. It made chasing sleep difficult at best, and what little she’d managed to secure after drifting through streams and VR chats for much of the night hadn’t exactly been of the highest quality. It wasn’t the sort of state she’d wanted to be in for a thing like this. Her friends wouldn’t be too happy if they ended up with a zombie on the front line, and MVS … well the less thought given to them the better.

That was perhaps one of the few benefits that came with her present state of mind. As much as it had occupied her thoughts the night before, come the morning she hadn’t quite been all there enough to think more than a few moments ahead. She didn’t have the energy or brainspace for worrying over walking into the lion’s den alone, and the sheer distance between herself and her friends didn’t even cross her mind – not until it was too late at least. Only once she’d crossed the point of no return did those doubts finally find purchase.

No briefing. No sign of other testers. Armed guards. Not exactly what she had been expecting.

But then maybe it should have been: this was MVS after all.

Suddenly sober, she swallowed hard, did her best to force those worries down into the pit of her stomach and meekly played along. She’d never hear the end of it if she chickened out of this one after all.
This message was last edited by the player at 22:35, Tue 01 June 2021.

The doctor arrives after a moment, walks you through another quick NDA, and attaches monitoring equipment. The prompt to enter the game appears, and you sign in. The world around you fades, replaced by an expansive grey field.

A synthesized voice comes on a moment later.

"Welcome to Avalon. Verifying codes...verifying access level...TGS-beta confirmed....welcome! My name is Komon. I will be your virtual guide in the world of Avalon Online. As you explore the gameworld, it is my job to provide you with information, support, and guidance to help you acclimate yourself. Before you join the rest of your party, please confirm that you are using the build selected before game start."

The voice is smooth, precise, utterly lifelike and yet somehow very clearly synthetic. The AI sounds feminine, and has a certain emotional tenor, as though actually looking forward to working with you.

"This is the menu screen, where you can make selections about your character and access information about the game rules and world. You can access the menu at any time by saying 'Access menu.' Please note that doing so does not pause the gameworld, and you should only do so when you are in a safe location. Now, let's introduce you to the gameworld."

The grey fades out to a black void with the Avalon Online logo on it in silver before fading in to a grassy plain, incredibly lifelike, with a group of people standing in it. In the distance you can see a river winding its way lazily along.

Mirima is there, in the group. She'd already decided on a new character, and from the looks of it, the plan is something far from her usual flashy speedster. At the moment, she's rolling the lace of one cuff between her fingers with a bemused look. She's synching up really well for the bandwidth she must be putting over her QE-Fi pipe. Better than usual, if anything.

"Took you all long enough," she starts with a grin. "I've waited here for milliseconds! We'll find out if they included an aging system at this rate! So hey, anybody go under the knife for this one? I have to hear details." Apparently satisfied with her investigation of the fabric, she waves a couple fingers vaguely at a flowering thistle. It begins to liquefy and peel open. Andarrea/Mirima frowns.

Confirming pre-selected options presented to him without really looking at them and bodylessly sighing at the additional NDA, Alvin endured the loading screen and nodded along with Komon as his virtual body took shape around his senses.

Alvin, now attempting to adopt his online guise as Vaxilion, squints for a moment as the world comes into focus. This focus did not seem to be strictly visual, which was unusual. Neural interface technology allowed for the simulation of virtually any sort of synesthesia, and he could swear that he could feel the things he was seeing with startling precision. Closing his eyes for a moment didn't seem to change this sense at all.

"No," he replies simply. "Though I doubt there's much available to upgrade my jack right now," he gestures distractedly at the back of his head, which does not feature the trans-dermal neural jack on his in-game avatar.

His gaze snaps to the liquefying thistle as it melts. "That's odd," he says. Its melting doesn't seem to be what he's talking about.

Calvin shook his head. "Please wait, Komon; I would like to customize my build first." Character customization was half the fun, and if he was doing any sort of decent beta testing, poking around the menu would be part of it.

Pulling up the menus, he started browsing through. It was an interesting system he hadn't seen before- pretty freeform. Wealth seemed fun, and then there was Desire- that was a surprise to see, actually, what with the review boards these things were subject to- and Shapeshifting? Both the last two were ones he was curious how they handled. Sure, you had sexy sims, but it'd be a bold move for a triple-A studio to tell the review boards to shove it. You also had dedicated animal sims, but… mappings were tricky. The three had a very indulgent appeal to them as a combination, although he suspected they might not live up to the promise. A few others had jumped out at him, like Deception for very amusing NPC interactions, but nothing that shook the initial impression. Still, he was going to finish the list.

He'd just about settled on it when he hit the end of the list, where the theme changed. Rather than abstractions, it dealt in creatures. He wasn't much of a dragon person, but a closer inspection revealed something very interesting. There was a gift that did a lot of what Wealth did, a gift that did a lot of what Shapeshifting did, and a gift that… well, it didn't cover Desire, but it did have mind control for minions. That was honestly preferable to anything too steamy in a closely monitored closed beta. The fact that it also came with great combat benefits sold it. Dragon, with Deception and Luck to make a bit more of a trickster character. Fill in some rough background- he could worry about that more later, and being a shapeshifter who could lie perfectly meant nobody could really say what had or hadn't been him.

"All right, Komon. Go ahead and load me in." He paused, because the assistant had rather more life about her than most. "And thank you for your patience," he added. From the length of the customization menu, the devs had obviously put a whole lot of work into this, and addressing Komon was, in a way, addressing them.

And then he was in the game proper.

He had been wrong. Clearly, the devs had been working to save beloved family members held at gunpoint. He was a dragon. He'd gone in expecting the usual clumsy feeling of having a butt-arm and two back-shoulder-arms as the link used familiar proprioception patterns. But he didn't have a butt-arm, he had a tail. He hadn't opted into flight, since the menu had given some clarification on temporary access, but his wings definitely felt wing-like rather than more arm.

They hadn't skimped on the dragon fantasy. He was the size of an elephant more or less, but with sleek elegance befitting a panther. Mottled black scales, some very murderous claws, and a whip-like tail. "Oh, sorry. Just haven't seen body-mapping done this well before. Also had a fun time poking around character creation. It's Calvin, by the way. Going with 'Vin' to make the local name easy to remember. No extra surgery or anything for this, just some checking up on what I have, so I guess whatever they're doing can work with mid-spec pretty well." He flexed one hand's claws experimentally, looking down at them. Satisfying.

During the signup process there had been a few online meetings to focus group initial adopters, what aspects of Avalon Online they were most interested in and what they were aware of in the upcoming bestseller. After one of those meetings (one she'd missed actually), Alessandra had been direct-messaged access to a character creation database.

Without any direct context on the game she had answered a series of questions about where she would allocate her Attribute points (which seemed to be a fairly standard StrDeCoInWiCha array), and then been asked to determine the key Words that would help to define her original experience. Well. Okay then.

She entered 'Cities' and the vague soothing space on her screen had filled with a kind of English Victoriana-aesthetic city. Okay, she could work with this.

'Sky' was next, and the clouds above the city cleared to reveal enormous silver-grey balloons as the whole extended structure lifted into the clouds. She had found herself smiling in the dim light from the screen.

Okay, this could work. If all the worldshards were as diverse as the promotional material implied, this was probably the way to choose her starting zone and probably some of the early quests.

The interface wanted one more option before it would move on to character creation. Alessandra was honestly fairly happy with what she was seeing - it wasn't perfect, but what game was? She considered a few more options, then tried adding 'Night' and the sunlight around the soaring city was replaced by lamps and starlight and the cold white light of the moon.

There, that would do well.

Her character design was almost an afterthought. The cosmetics were rarely as good in the game as they were on the design screen, but in the full VR immersion you learnt to look beyond that. The freedom and the full-world experience were worth that anyway, and until the latest generation of MVS neural jacks it was a trade-off she was happy to make. Her personal rig was fairly modern, but rumour had it the full-body rigs in the MVS building were bleeding edge with full EMS support.

The details were different in places, but any of her guild mates would recognise her at a glance. A lithe, elegant build with pale hair, light leather armour were common to most of her builds in other online experiences they'd shared. She chose a few interesting jewellery pieces that caught her eye from the options and called it done.

That brought her back to the suite on the 101st floor of the MVS building, where she had been left sitting with the medical bed and the beeping machines. A bit gun-shy, she inspected the machines with an experienced eye before she leaned back and waited. The neural jack seemed standard enough, although there was an assembly she didn't recognise around its root with blinking green lights and a spiral of darker metal traced around the jack itself. The doctor came in and they walked through the document before she gave her geneprint and then laid back as the power came up. The bed came alive and shifted into a support cocoon as the jack slid into her NRS and her vision and her consciousness sank into a new synthetic universe.

Finding herself in the group now, she lifted her hand and worked her fingers before her eyes. Huh. Looked like the hype might have been justified this time. Next thing the white-haired avatar was doing a fluid approximation of the Robot. All the movements seemed to be synching well, and she looked up at the others in her group standing in the sunny grassy plain.

"Hey there it's Alley," she said (probably) superfluously. "No surgery here, but... wow, that's impressive Vin." She looked up at the enormous dragon, then poked his side experimentally with a fingertip.
This message was last edited by the player at 20:40, Wed 02 June 2021.

Alsander is not a religious man. His role in the Townie experiential bubble means he performs a farcical recreation of a Qanonysmite precursor faith, but he doesn't believe it, doesn't fear the sad looking god nailed to the wall of the reconstructed church.

No, all Alsander's holy terror is reserved for Corporate.

The journey to the building, typically hidden behind rainbows and clouds so as not to disrupt the visitor experience to the island too much, feels like a procession to his own sacrifice.
The elevator ride is an ascent to heaven's antechambers where his brain will be scooped out and weighed against loyalty to the Brand, the atoms of his soul counted and assessed. The journey is made in mute surrender.

His bright smile is a rictus that will never reach his eyes.


Login is swift and smooth and he barely looks at his build - he recalls picking something as different from life as he could manage, loosely based on his favourite SWSO fighter Iron Maiden.

He arrives in the grassy loading area with a jolt, an attack of nausea as the unfamiliar air hits him and the ground seems to writhe under feet that feel... detached. Cut off and sewn back on, barely vascular, strangely humming. He flails and falls and staggers until a cold clarity settles over him.
He can feel throbbing generators, the hiss of hydraulics under taut, chemically preserved skin.

Slowly he recovers his feet. A black cloak constructs itself from simple nanofabricators that lurk in his personal EM field.

He turns an inky black gaze on the others present, seeing them for the first time. Silently absorbing them like the vacuum of space. Somewhere a man in a hospital bed is sick and sweating with anxiety over meeting strangers unscripted.

Koriban Brood's dessicated lips peel back from carbon-fibre fangs, a rictus that will never reach his eyes.
This message was last edited by the player at 10:25, Thu 03 June 2021.

There wasn’t much need for Lexi to give any last minute thoughts her character, be that her appearance or her build. She’d spent more than enough time in the days and weeks beforehand weighing up her options, balancing out comfort and familiarity with the desire to meet this new frontier with something fresh. It would’ve been all too easy to garb herself in a familiar face once more – perhaps Maerathyl the wildwood mage or starpriest Yndari – but instead she’d found herself wanting something more solid. That her guildmates tended to prefer finesse and keeping their distance to proper front-liners might just have gone some way towards influencing her decision too.

So had the noble Saraya Brightheart sprung to life.

Running through the last few checks before taking the plunge, Lexi couldn’t help but feel a creeping sense of uncertainty. Maybe it was being under close observation or just last minute jitters but things just didn’t seem quite right. She found herself making micro-adjustments to the smallest of details, shifting colours by degrees and checking symbols were absolutely centred, before biting the bullet and forcing herself to admit that no, everything was already what she wanted - close enough anyway. She’d presumably be able to tinker in-game if anything really got on her nerves later on.

Smiling – forcing herself to smile – she okayed her choices, and then Saraya Brightheart really did spring to life.

---

Stepping out into someone else’s body (that was also your body) was always a novel experience – it never got old. That it let her enjoy being taller, stronger, more was also a big plus in Lexi’s books. Between that and the (vaguely) familiar faces awaiting her on the other side she couldn’t help but let that smile drift somewhere more genuine. Maybe MVS was merrily dredging through their brains right now but at least the company was good.

Lexi drank in their surrounds, the towering dragon and the techno-gothic nightmare, with something like wonder and found herself nodding in agreement with Alley. “Feeling a little shown up here,” she smirked, all good-natured cheer. “You're making me regret keeping things simple.”
This message was last edited by the player at 21:08, Fri 04 June 2021.

Vin looked smug, stretching leisurely. "I did pick up something for human forms, so we won't need to worry about the sci-fi plots trying to cram a dragon in and so on," he said, waving a claw. His tail curled around suddenly, poking Alley back. "I'm not exactly a connoisseur, but if this is the level of detail they put into an optional subsystem, they're gonna have a hard time getting me out of here when they're done with the testing. Hmm. Definitely going to need to clear some subscriptions for this once the actual release comes out," he mused. "Anybody else do something they like with their build?"

  "I was pretty proud of the light show," muses Mirima, through a demihuman skin that absolutely screams "the #shadows ancestry". She reaches out experimentally toward the nearby stream, and immediately a section a meter across begins also flowing through the bank twice that far to the side, reproduced perfectly without the water apparently coming from or going anywhere. She waves at the skeleton.

  "Hi newbie. Do you like the light show?" In case she hadn't already made her point, she points up at a flock of starlings overhead, and they immediately burst out of her, heading the same direction they had been. But now their feathers are all black and pointed the wrong way, making them look larger and furry.

  "I had it set up so I could spy on people from long range, then show up as part of the bolt of lightning that strikes them."
This message was last edited by the player at 04:59, Sat 05 June 2021.

Adrian was impressed with the quality of the virtual assistants voice, how lifelike and emotive it was. In truth that was what captured the lion's share of his focus and he spent more than a little bit of time thinking over how they had accomplished it rather than actually listening to what the AI, what Komon, had actually said. Coming to the realization that the assistant was waiting on him to do...something he sheepishly had Komon repeat her instructions.

It was fairly routine to have players confirm that they were going into the game with the build they intended. Adrian himself had stated out an undead, of a kind. He was still largely humanoid, save the phantasmal flames that seemed to have replaced his blood, with pallor gray skin, ashen white eyes, and short raven black hair. In his own estimation his avatar was pretty handsome but he had a fairly slanted view on aesthetics so it was really anyone's guess.

All the same he accepted and entered the game, the rest of the team having already gathered.

"Did I miss anything important?"

The white-haired woman gasped and then laughed as the tail poked her in the stomach. Prehensile, very nice!

That made her wonder if...

She frowned and half-bent forwards, and two great wings of translucent azure light drove out through her back, bating as she straightened up. That felt different, not the energy prosthetics she'd expected. She could feel the air brushing against feathers she hadn't had before, on skin that didn't normally feel the wind. She flexed experimentally and her wings beat once.

She smiled at Vin, "Well, I can race you in the sky sometime - maybe go for some aerial kareoke and see if we can hear each other over the wind?"

Alley checked out Mirima's show as well, putting her weight over to one foot and clapping. "If he doesn't, I do. Nice tricks, can't wait to see you do the lightning thing too. That should make fast travel a cinch as well, at least as long as you don't get caught in an escort quest."

Her lips twitched in memory. Some things had never changed from the primitive days of RPG computer gaming, well before her birth.

A gesture toward a nearby tree resulted in a small branch being neatly severed from the whole. It clattered through other branches on its way toward the ground as Alvin - Vaxilion - scowled at it. "That was not fire," he said. A few other gestures resulted in no effects.

He looked at his pale hand as if it had betrayed him for a moment. He also didn't recall setting his skin tone to be quite so... faded.

"I'm not sure my build loaded correctly," he concluded. Komon had told him a verbal phrase to bring up the menu, rather than a gesture as he had expected. "Access menu," he said to the air, addressing the system. "Let's see what's up."

  "Yeah, same here. That would have been the lightning bolt trick." Mirima nods in Adrian's direction, still looking up at the sky. "But everything's... garbled. I didn't know what that would do, really, but I knew it wouldn't be lightning."

  She looks down finally, to glare at the guilty index finger, but it seems to yield no answers. Once, briefly, something like recognition crosses her features, but it's quickly swallowed up again. She shrugs.

  "Definitely made us both spookier, too. There's no way for us to check that for being random, tragically. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind being the most stereotypical evil sorceress ever conceived." She pauses a fraction of a second too long, after the emphasis, before resuming so precisely the '-ved" was still finishing. "—in the slightest. But it's absolutely some kind of glitch. Ohhh—! I was hoping this would be a fun beta and it. is starting. sowell!"

"Accessing menu."

Alvin's surroundings fade to the grey menu page. On it, he can pull up his build and find that it doesn't at all seem to be what he put in. After a moment, he finds that it was changed prior to logging in, with the changes registered to his own account.

"Maybe a glitch," Alvin agreed tentatively, scrolling through his current character build and briefly examining the abilities to get an idea of what they did. "Maybe not?

"This says I changed build settings sometime before login, but, of course, I did no such thing. Could it be a bug? I guess. Could be a dev hack too, I guess. Though I don't know why - and why they'd use my credentials to do it instead of a dev account." This, his guildmates knew, was fairly consistent behavior - speculating out loud about things they didn't really have enough data to form sound theories about.

He shrugged, "Hard to say either way without talking to a GM or something. I suppose its not impossible that I accidentally hit some sort of randomization function, though these abilities are a little to thematically consistent to be random picks."

Alvin scrolled around to examine other menu options. He was a little curious as to what sort of settings were available to such a full-sensory experience as this. He also wasn't sure how they were intended to submit bugs or otherwise provide feedback, so he kept an eye out for a menu option for that as well.

"Was sort of expecting a more classic fire-and-lightning sort of caster experience," he admitted. "But I'm not adverse to seeing what some of these abilities do instead. Re-rolling would probably take too long."

Adrian looked at the apparent glitches that his fellow players were experiencing and frowned.

"That's unfortunate. We should definitely keep note of that. Definitely pull the timestamp for the error reporting. Should help them search through the event logs."

"Or wait. You think the error logging is automated during the beta? I'm still not sure how much of the game is going to be fully autonomous yet."

Realizing that he wasn't actually talking to any in particular he stopped talking and instead starting looking around as his surroundings. After a cursory glance he offered a general question.

"So...where to now?"

Just rezzed in and already there were glitches. Alley shook her head, already mentally rehearsing lines in her comments. And overwriting Vaxilion's character setup wasn't amazing either, whoever or however they'd done that.

"I hope so..." she said thoughtfully, then had an idea.

"Komon, bug report," she tried. "Character Vaxilion build settings not as originally designed by player. Possible data corruption. End report."

It might work. Or maybe she'd just wasted her time talking to the air.

She couldn't think of anything she'd done differently, but her build seemed to mostly be functioning as designed. She pointed her toes and her wings beat powerfully, lifting her inches off the ground. She was flying!

"Does anyone know what settings are open to us? There was a city backdrop in my character creation, but I don't know if that was a real place or just background."

There should be some variety on the Plane of Endless Green.

Vin laughed a little, flapping his wings. "Sure, I'd be happy to try out flying. I have to confess, though... I didn't have enough points to get it as a permanent buy; I have to get it as a temporary buy. As far whether my build goes, I don't know- most of my stuff focused on NPC interaction. But I also didn't prep anything beforehand; I just built off of what was available from the extensive in-game menu." Vin looked over curiously at the others who were having issues. "I mean, I at least loaded in as a dragon. Oh, that's the one thing I can try easily." A moment later, he was a human. Clothed, fortunately. Next, another human. And finally, back to a dragon to make sure that all worked. "Working so far on my end, Komon."

Seeing the bug reports already start to pile up Lexi couldn't help but click her tongue. So it was only a beta build and it was their very job to catch stuff like this, but she'd certainly assumed the devs would have gone out of their way to make a good first impression, especially after all the effort put into character creation. Hard not to start having doubts about just how immersive this sim might be if its unfinished nature was already starting to show.

Shrugging off any rising doubts, she brought a fist up and willed a bold golden aura into being about it. That brought a smile to her face. Lexi amused herself a moment moving her arm through forms, watching that energy trail and solidify like molten gold, before waving it away with a flick of her hand, the power dissipating like sparks on the wind. "I haven't got the best kit to test things out here, mostly social and reactive defence - think parries, but I think everything is as it should be. I did keep things pretty close to one of the presets though, so it might just be that I played it safe enough not to hit any trouble. Hard to say."

"All seems to be fine for me, Komon," she told the air. Adrian's question had left an impression though. Lexi's eyes flicked his way and then back to the nebulous 'up' before her. "So Komon ... is this supposed to be the starting zone or is it just some tutorial space and you're waiting to hear we're happy to move on?"

  While the others sort out their thoughts about the initialization, Mirima silently steps through the gestural and cognitive triggers for the abilities she does have. That cocky yago gave her a scare, and she absolutely meant to burn some secrecy to express her pique. But from all appearances, her new kit is at least as complete as the one she picked. She smiles in the fourth way and folds her component asura tightly down until they vanish into empty maya. A commission then. Well.

  "Mm, leave me out of those, yeah? Aidan can bring it to immediate attention. I'll see if my later advances are corrupted in the same way so I can give them something more complete. You know how I love mistakes!" And their friend does, indeed, look excited by the prospect. She presses her palms together and stamps one foot, and a circle of runes expands nearly two meters from her feet. In reality, the shifting of the glyphs is probably race conditions and a corrupted textures file, but the VR is very effective at presenting it as a creeping blasphemy against Sight itself.

  "So we want to head out of here? Anybody who can't fly, I have us covered." Blades of grass thicken into thorns along vines that erupt from the loose soil and wind around her ankles. Something is whispering in Andarrea's voice, but it can't be her: she's talking. "Shouldn't even need to unlock fast travel. There's already a note on these about not updating terrain costs properly. Just give me a few seconds."

"No bug is detected; the build notes were entered by your account. If you believe your account's security compromised, please contact an administrator immediately. And this is a tutorial area to introduce basic RPG mechanics. Would you like to skip the tutorial?"

Adrian listened and watched, much to his dismay, as Mirima attempted to cast a spell of some kind. It was frankly the most unsettling thing he'd had the misfortune of witnessing in a VR game. Not only did it seem like a glitch given form it decided that moving and shifting was a good idea. Still so long as it did what it was supposed to he'd let it go.

"Thanks Mirima. My kit does not have flight in it and I'm not likely to get it anytime soon. I've always been a fan of mounts and fast-travel myself."

He looked up idly into the sky for a moment.

"Might make myself something nice this time around. Pretty sure one of my powers is just the crafting interface fully unlocked with a gutted GUI."

He then heard the voice of Komon speaking to the group and a frown spread out over his face. His tone, however, seemed almost reverent.

"Komon just used a conjunction. It just combined distinct requests from separate players into a single response. Even layered in a prompt. That's sick."

"So are we doing the tutorial or no?"

Alsander listens to the conversation with a blend of detached apathy and mounting, terrified confusion.

They don't talk like Guests. He doesn't have any scripts for this interaction.

"I'd like to," he says meekly, in reply to the other spookily-themed player's question. "If it's not too much trouble. I've never played a game this advanced before. But if that's not convenient I understand!" His tone brightens; this is slightly more familiar territory. "You can just leave me here while you explore and enjoy your stay; you can..." he starts to trail off, a handful of protocols warring in his head. "..find assistance wherever you go, probably. Uhm."

Despite the shift in tone he continues to grin and maintain eye contact.